Can’t see the forest for the microscopes: Leveraging the big picture.
In my last article, I outlined the pitfalls of attempting to align on a single source of truth to address multiple data needs. Building a single source of truth is problematic for many reasons, the most fundamental being that each data request reflects a distinct and legitimate need. Addressing these needs individually is crucial for the organization to enable customer engagements as effectively and efficiently as possible. In other words, there is no single truth.
Turns out, this isn’t entirely true.
While attempting to create one source of truth is a losing battle, there are fundamental truths that apply to all engagement data regardless of source, purpose, or use. Acknowledging these truths is key to solving any engagement challenge an organization faces.
A primary objective of every organization is to create, leverage, and facilitate engagements with audiences that result in behaviors benefiting the organization. This objective underpins the existence of marketing, sales, product development, and customer service departments.
Every engagement, regardless of purpose, audience, time, or place, can be described by answering the same six questions:
Who is engaging?
What are they engaging about?
Where is the engagement occurring?
When is the engagement occurring?
Why does the organization desire the engagement?
How did the organization enable the engagement to occur?
Everything marketing, sales, product development, and customer service do is designed to address one or more of these six questions.
The last point bears repeating.
Everything marketing, sales, product development, and customer service do is designed to impact who, what, where, when, why, and/or how engagements occur.
This is a simple yet profound statement. By consistently describing engagements and mapping every decision and action taken to facilitate those engagements in these terms, any truth the organization needs can be analyzed and addressed.
Because these truths align to the same data definitions and framework, they can be joined and aligned in ways that are difficult or nearly impossible today. This alignment fuels benefits throughout the organization:
Consistent and clear reports that can be redeployed quickly to deliver business insights.
Easier implementation of automation solutions to drive business efficiency.
Cross-channel journeys to better encourage the right audience behaviors.
Personalization at scale to ensure the right message is sent to the right audience at the right time.
Easier, less disruptive, and less risky implementation of new technologies (like AI) to “future-proof” an organization.
Most importantly, this framework represents a common language that can describe any organizational activity in terms everyone can understand. This improves communication and minimizes the misalignments and misunderstandings that hamper business performance.
So keep using your microscope, just make sure to look around and remember where you are.
